A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon

Writer/Director Bart Sibrel bases his work here around a can of film that he says was mistakenly sent to him by NASA. He says it shows the astronauts faking the television footage of their trip to the moon by employing camera tricks. The astronauts were in low Earth orbit all the time, and editors on the ground composed this raw footage into just a few seconds of finished film.

Unfortunately Sibrel's research is so slipshod that he doesn't realize his "backstage" footage is really taken in large part from the 30-minute live telecast (also on that reel) that was seen by millions, not hidden away in NASA vaults as he implies. And we have to wonder why Sibrel puts his own conspiratorial narration over the astronauts' audio in the footage, because hearing the astronauts in their own words clearly spells out that the astronauts were just testing the camera, not faking footage.

Finally, anyone can see the raw footage for themselves without having to buy Sibrel's hacked-up version of it. (He shows you more of the Zapruder film of JFK's assassination than of his "smoking gun".) Sibrel thinks he's the only one who's seen it. What's more revealing is the clips from that raw footage that Sibrel chose NOT to use, such as those clearly showing the appropriately distant Earth being eclipsed by the window frames and so forth, destroying his claim that mattes and transparencies were placed in the spacecraft windows to create the illusion of a faraway Earth.

As with most films of this type, Sibrel relies on innuendo, inexpert assumption, misleading commentary, and selective quotation to manipulate the viewer into accepting a conclusion for which there is not a shred of actual evidence.